Reliable: it is a vital point. You cannot afford to have downtime. With a downtime you will not only lose sales but credibility. Check what type of servers they have and their up time. If there are any testimonials look at them and determine that they are authentic.

Customer support: As you can never predict what type of technical problems you might have it is vital to have a professional and online support.

Monthly agreement (with zero fees for cancellation): Be sure to examine the agreement carefully and ensure that you only sign on a monthly basis not 6 months or a year. Make sure that there are no fees for cancellation.

Set up fee: Web host companies should not charge this.

Back up: Does your new host offer back up services?

FTP access: This is a useful feature that allows you to upload your website whenever you have any changes or additions to your website.

Email accounts: Make sure you have enough email addresses for your business.

Bandwidth (traffic) allowed: Normally 5GB is acceptable for most websites. Make sure you understand how much you are getting in your webhost package.

Extra services: Is it included in the monthly charge? Look into what you will have to pay if you need any more services in the future?

Price: Ensure you take into consideration, your site needs. Prices can fluctuate; cheap is not always a bad choice. It is sensible to look at this carefully.

With these few tips you will be able to choose your webhost company.

“The new offering is a hardware-based expansion of Big Blue’s Scale Out File Services and is based on IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS).

“The Samba-based systems include management nodes, switches, interface nodes, data storage nodes, RAID controllers and expansion units, and offer snapshot capabilities, tiered storage and HSM through Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).

“It includes Gigabit Ethernet, 10Gigabit Ethernet and 20Gbps InfiniBand connections, and the storage system can combine up to 30 interface nodes and 30 240-drive storage pods to reach 7.2PB with 1TB drives and 14.4PB with 2TB drives, which will be coming in April, a month after general availability.”

The February update for Windows will close the loophole that dates from the time of the DOS operating system. First appearing in Windows NT 3.1, the vulnerability has been carried over into almost every version of Windows that has appeared since. The monthly security update will also tackle a further 25 holes in Windows, five of which are rated as “critical”.

Home hijack

The ancient bug was discovered by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy in January 2010 and involves a utility that allows newer versions of Windows to run very old programs.

Mr Ormandy has found a way to exploit this utility in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as Windows Vista and Windows 7.  The patch for this vulnerability will appear in the February security update. Five of the vulnerabilities being patched at the same time allow attackers to effectively hijack a Windows PC and run their own programs on it.

As well as fixing holes in many versions of Windows, the update also tackles bugs in Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2004 for Apple Macintosh machines.  The bumper update is not the largest that Microsoft has ever released. The security update for October 2009 tackled a total of 34 vulnerabilities. Eight of those updates were rated as critical – the highest level.

In January 2010, Microsoft released an “out of band” patch for a serious vulnerability in Internet Explorer that was being exploited online. The vulnerability was also thought to be the one used to attack Google in China.

Following the attack on Google, many other cyber criminals started seeking ways to exploit the loophole.

Also this week, a security researcher has reported the discovery of a vulnerability in Internet Explorer that allows attackers to view the files held on a victim’s machine.  Microsoft has issued a security bulletin about the problem and aims to tackle it at a future date. At the moment there is no evidence that this latest find is being actively exploited online.

Source: Tech at BBC

The article states that 20% of web users still use the browser that was first launched in 2001, includes government department, despite Windows incessant desire to update everything all the time.

Developers, it turns out, want the browser phased out so that they can develop stuff for newer browsing technologies. At the moment not many websites created for lower resolutions, nor people trying to create WAP versions of websites, so why should developers spend their time creating feature-rich websites for IE6!

Governments in other countries have recommended users switch browser completely, following a series of security flaws being discovered in the ever popular Microsoft product which, amongst other things, allowed the Chinese government to hack Google Mail accounts. It’s hardly a glowing recommendation for a product, especially when it took Microsoft so long to repair the flaw.

Should users stick with IE (in any of its last three incarnations)? Will Firefox continue its slow rise to the top? Is Chrome ever going to be a contender? Time will tell…

Since a computer system or a network consists of many parts in which all parts usually need to be present in order for the whole to be operational, much planning for high availability centers around backup and failover processing and data storage and access. For storage, a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) is one approach. A more recent approach is the storage area network (SAN).

Some availability experts emphasize that, for any system to be highly available, the parts of a system should be well-designed and thoroughly tested before they are used. For example, a new application program that has not been thoroughly tested is likely to become a frequent point-of-breakdown in a production system.

They call the standard model “best practice.” When they’re in a different mood, they also call desktop lockdown a best practice, leaving you to figure out how it is that you tell your customers what they can and can’t do.

So we’ve had to run along the corridor, trying to make sense of it all. But you can’t make sense of nonsense.
I admit this conclusion is not a growing consensus. It isn’t even an emerging trend. It’s more a guerilla movement, promoted covertly by some renegade CIOs and supported by a few consultants and commentators who have rejected the conventional wisdom and industry punditry in favor of what their experience tells them works in real organizations.

Bassam Fawaz, CIO of a large global logistics company, is one of the renegades. According to Fawaz, “The IT conventional wisdom that is generously dispensed by many IT think-tanks and opinion makers is largely theoretical and offers little or no practical value.”

Businesses are starting to shake off the recession and think about the future instead of simply making it to next week. It’s the perfect time to board the right train — the one headed to the promised land, where IT is a strategic partner to the rest of the business, not a subservient order taker content to process work requests while accepting the blame for everything that goes wrong.

Want to board the right train? Your ticket to the promised land begins with this: No one inside your company is your customer.

Thinking that they are is the core fallacy of the standard model, and it has caused no end of trouble.

Take the common complaint voiced by (among others) Dirk Huggett, an IT business analyst for the North Dakota Information Technology Department: “You are always too expensive. One classic example is PCs,” he says. “Executives get flyers from different vendors for $299 laptops and get upset when the ones they buy cost them $800. It is tough to explain why the cheaper PC won’t run their mission-critical application. More information

Major deals involving Cisco included the purchase of LAN switching firm Arrowpoint Communications for $5.7 billion (£3.6 billion) in 2000, digital cable provider Scientific-Atlanta for $6.9 billion (£4.3 billion) three years later and web conferencing business WebEx for $3.2 billion (£2 billion) in 2007.

The VentureSource index was dominated by major IT organisations, with Google, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard among those also appearing, underlining the nature of an industry that demands constant development and innovation.

Despite heading up the leader board for the decade, Cisco saw a slowdown in deal activity last year, making just two acquisitions in 2009. Software giant Oracle was the most acquisitive company in 2009, having made five acquisitions during the year.

Both Cisco and Oracle have begun this decade in similar fashion to the last, with reports suggesting the former has acquired data centre and cloud security start-up Rohati Systems, while the latter this week announced a deal to acquire data quality firm Silver Creek Systems.

In terms of both customers and acreage, Chester is the UK’s biggest zoo. The 450-acre site receives around 1.3 million visitors each year, and has more than 7,000 animals and 400 different species, including many endangered ones.

As the zoo’s data-storage requirements have increased over the years, so has the need for additional servers, and the server room’s air conditioning system was beginning to struggle with the levels of heat being released.

Chester Zoo IT manager Phil Morris said: “I’d started to feel that we shouldn’t increase the number of servers because of the limited air conditioning capacity – increasing storage in that way simply wasn’t sustainable.”

To control the over-heating problem the zoo decided to reduce the number of physical servers in the server room and maintain its model of one application per server. It decided to deploy virtualisation.

After rejecting what Morris claims was a “colossal” quote from VMware to virtualise Chester Zoo’s server estate, Morris looked at Microsoft’s Hyper-V system.

He said: “They gave us an affordable price, particularly as Chester Zoo’s registered charity status meant we received a good concession with our licensing fees.”

Initially Chester rolled out test environments using the Hyper-V R1, but didn’t want to perform a full migration until the R2 version shipped, because it was keen to deploy R2’s Live Migration feature, which allows virtual servers to be moved in real time.

Chester virtualised its accounts, time attendance, and personnel systems as well as two electronic point-of-sale (Epos) servers plus a number of databases.

Morris said: “We’re committed to virtualising as much physical tin into our virtualised environment as possible.”

It took between one and two hours to virtualise each server, which are all now 64-bit; the previous servers were 32-bit.

The system saves the zoo money as a result of the reduced power required. Morris said: “We’re saving almost £11,000 per year, and we’ll achieve a return on investment in under three years through these savings and not having to buy extra hardware.”

Chester Zoo’s green credentials have always been impressive – it has twice won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise (Sustainable Development) – and virtualising its servers will further reduce its carbon footprint.

However, the virtualisation project was justified on the basis of the savings the business would make.

Chester Zoo has yet to virtualise its Exchange server, but has plans to do so. “We’ll look to move to Exchange 2010 and put that on a virtual system. Currently we’re on Exchange 2003,” said Morris.

Chester Zoo now has six 64-bit systems, three of them are dual CPU, quad-core Dell 2950 servers running 3.2GHz processors with 32GB of system memory.

There are several factors that can limit application performance; they are the CPU processing power, and how much memory is available, with memory being the more costly thing, according to Morris.

“When we bought the boxes we insisted that they were configured with the biggest [memory] chips in such a way that we could purchase new chips and take memory up to the maximum allowable [64GB],” he added.
Source: computing.co.uk

In its 2010 Threat Predictions report, issued this week, McAfee Labs said sites like Facebook and Twitter have given cybercriminals new technologies to work with and new centers of activity that can be exploited.

McAfee said users of social networking sites will become “more vulnerable to attacks that distribute rogue applications across their networks” and that cybercriminals will take advantage of users trusting their “friends” to get them to click on links they might otherwise treat cautiously.

The California-based firm says it also expects to see increased threats to banking security and a rise in e-mail attachments delivering malicious software, or malware.

McAfee says 2010 will also bring changes in the world of “botnets,” armies of infected computers used to spread malware. The firm says law enforcement has already been successful in taking down botnets and predicts many more successes in the pursuit of cybercriminals in 2010.

With the introduction of Windows Server 2008 R2, x86 (32-bit) architecture hardware is no longer supported. Due to this change, for the major server hardware out there, a migration process would be required. A typical migration process involves the following steps:

1. clean installation of the operating system
2. installation of server role(s)
3. move data and settings from source to destination (new) server
4. point the clients to the new server

Migration steps are different based on the server role or the applications to be migrated. There is no single step to migrate all types of server roles or applications, hence there are quite a lot of factors we will need to consider, which will be covered below.

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